The difficulty of writing odes to objects lies in how to avoid both excessive adherence to and total detachment from the objects depicted. A poem thus created will be marvelous, natural and elegant. (Yuan Mei: Addendum to Suiyuan Remarks on Poetry)

The best odes to objects, according to Zen philosophy, should not resemble real-life objects too closely nor be totally detached from them. There have been many poems depicting plum blossoms since ancient times. For example, Lin Hejing's poetic terms like “subtle fragrance” and “scattered shadows” of plum blossoms have been passed on over centuries, but Huang Shangu remarked that they were not so good as Lin's other lines: “A garden of half-blossomed plums after the wintry snow, a slanting twig visible over the fence by the riverside.” Insightful people believe that Su Shi's poetic line “Miraculous is the single twig slanting out of the bamboo grove” is unrivalled and that only those who really know how to appreciate poetry understand why this is so. (Wang Shizhen: A Postscript to “The Plum Blossom Ode by Huang Congsheng”)